TWO

THEN THE SHARE PRICE in David’s company doubled. I sold half and the remaining half tripled. I was trying to figure out what to do with the money, but it was hard for me to be frivolous and so I banked the money in the general coffers. Then I thought it was wrong, somehow, to be paying the rent and buying food with windfalls. I decided to write again, but this time it wouldnt be fiction. I did not want to be cutting edge. I wanted something old fashioned, and it was not out of a desire to resuscitate a dying art. In ways I’ve always been drawn to the arts that are extinct rather than the methods that are avant-garde. I thought about what my ideal job would be and it came to me that copywriting was the most humble of writing jobs. I would love to write for a TV guide, someone who writes out the synopses for television programs. I did not own a television, which made the enterprise all the more beguiling. So I walked down to the local cable network and asked for a position. But that sort of go-between job doesnt exist any more, they just format what the stations feed to them, a receptionist told me, which meant working for a television network in Buffalo, and I have my limits. Then, when I left their studios on Queen Street, I passed the newspaper vending boxes and looked at them and noticed the free weekly guide called Auto Trader. I flicked through one and realized, under the masthead, that it was the magazine that Lars Pony worked for. People’s cars. Why did people sell cars, why did people buy them. I looked around at the busy network of commerce and gridlock. There was something in this, something that reflected the changing fortunes of a populace. I took the magazine home and looked at it again at my desk. I stared at it intently, as though it were a work of art. I looked at the column of names of who worked at Auto Trader. Tessa Walcott web design. Lars Pony photographs. You dont see a name like Lars Pony very often, not in print, and there he was, Mr Pony of Corner Brook, whose father had learned the magnanimity of the innocent. Lars had operated a salvage yard, his son managed the severe torment we all gave him, though Lennox was a good goalie. My father knew Lars and liked the Ponys. So I contacted Auto Trader. I talked to the woman named Tessa Walcott. I told her my skills and I explained that I knew Lars Pony from when I was a kid. That Lars had called me some months before. I went in and met them. How is Lennox, I said again. And this time Mr Pony looked prouder. His son was in the oil patch. He was one of those Newfoundlanders who had gone west to Fort McMurray. There were more Newfoundlanders there than in Corner Brook. You want a job, he said, you got a job.

And so I wrote captions that accompanied the vehicles. I was good at it. They liked the adjectives I employed and the narrative voice. I turned every car into a little story. It was like an orphanage, this magazine, and it advertised the love you could receive from a loyal vehicle. I felt it was a creative output that was humble and I enjoyed being sneaky with language and wondered if anyone would notice.

Lars worked at the magazine during the day and picked up an extra two hundred a night teaching a photography course. And during the fall he persuaded me to take the course. Again, photography, in the age of the internet, seemed like a practice from a previous century, like copywriting, so I took to it. And Lars liked me, he humoured my penchant for old-fashioned things. Sometimes we walked home together. Then I saw him at the Y bench-pressing fifty kilos. I used to work weights with David back in high school. So I spotted him. He asked if I was any good at basketball. They had a pick-up game. I told him how Lennox, much younger than me, was picked before I was for sports. Lars was now in his late fifties and played guard. Once, about thirty-five years ago, he’d had a ten-day contract with the Indiana Pacers. This was before he’d ended up in Corner Brook. It was his last attempt to live an American life. Did we know this story about Lennox’s father? So I played with him—I was the only white man on four teams of five. We played ten-minute games and Lars took me on as a project. What if you came with me, he said. I take the pictures and you do the interview.

I was spotting him and he strained with the weights and popped open his eyes as his elbows straightened out. And in this way a column was born in Auto Trader. A sort of day-in-the-life of a vehicle owner. Lars snapped pictures of light trucks, classic cars, boats, bikes and RVs. It’s a good way to get to know a new city. I told David Twombly about Lars and he remembered Lennox and I suggested he should have Mr Pony over. That never happened. Somehow Lars Pony was not the person David wanted over. I realized there was a limit to David. That I represented some kind of artistic talent that he wanted to foster, but Lars Pony was a dead end, literally the scrap heap of civilization. I took it as a failing in David, but not something to argue about. I felt lucky that I could be happy with both ends of modern western living. I felt it vaguely important to know a black man. But David had this desire as well, he had gone to school at McGill partly so he could study French. For him, diversity in information was important for personal growth.

Lars lived in a block apartment in Regent Park. His wife was a Guinchard from Frenchman’s Cove, she wore a trucker’s cap with a pompom on it. I realized I’d never met her in Corner Brook. And then, one day last spring, Lars said he was leaving soon, moving to Montreal where his wife wanted to live. He told me this as we sat in a cafeteria eating German sausages. His legs bent so deeply that his knees almost touched the floor. You should come on board, he said, as a shadow. And take the pictures.

Under Lars Pony’s tutelage I’ve shot cottages and all-terrain vehicles, sleds and heavy equipment, using a digital camera, of course. I felt I had begun a new segment of life and it’s true that since I’d turned thirty-five I had begun to note that a life can be captured in seven-year intervals. But the past kept hauling into view.

For instance, David Twombly.

The rise in our relationship reached a crest and then continued on in a flat line, not increasing or decreasing in volume or activity. Perhaps there was only so much we had in common. We got together to drink. I was his legacy of artistic promise, but for how long could a connection be maintained based on a legacy? Especially since I’d surrendered to the fiction censor. I’d come to that convergence of talent and critical eye that stymies creation, that tells you most work is mediocre and so is your own, and why bother foisting it on a public when wiser, funnier and more dramatic examples of contemporary realism exist.

David invited me to house parties, grand affairs full of guests carrying passports. There were caterers in his kitchen and then stacks of white Italian plates that were handed around the circle and bright large cutlery rolled in powder blue napkins. We were to eat sitting where we could sit, with a shiny grilled scallop the size of a baseball sliced in half. And then a platter of carved beef that looked like chocolate, a chocolate filled with pink rhubarb. So it was like camp although I was alarmed to see that I was the only one wearing jeans. I sat between a woman who could not explain the work she did and a man who made synthesizers involved in speech recognition. His wife, he said, was at home. She was an artist. She made chocolate using a bicycle.

That’s where I saw her—at a catered party celebrating Sok Hoon’s birthday, where it was hard to count your drinks. Waiters kept filling your glass. There was dancing and through the dancing I noticed the movements of her body. You should trust how you react to a woman’s body. A bit of her jocularly cut dark hair and her sleeveless arm, her arm that kept darting in the air and then she pushed back to laugh. Watching her was like peering through a fence. A moving fence, or I was moving.

David barrelled into me. He was all hugs and leaning on my shoulder. Who is that, I said.

You dont remember Nell.

His voice was both grave and delicious.

I know her?

A long long time ago, he said in a songish voice.

And I knew he wasnt going to tell me. So I said, You got rid of the furniture.

David: Sold it. Every last stick.

Me:Times are tough.

Sok Hoon is leaving me.

I took a cracker and dipped it into olive paste and as I ate the cracker I thought of David without Sok Hoon. I realized I’d held a hunch that she was going to leave him, or at least should leave him. I’m not a diehard stay-together type of person. And Sok Hoon was smothered by David. Even her birthday was more about David’s lavishness at presenting her with organized love. She wasnt rash, either—her wisdom was perhaps superior to both mine and David’s. I also felt that David was strong enough to get through this, that in fact he might enjoy her departure. I wasnt upset or thinking I should help him. In fact I was looking at the dancers. I thought of Owen. And I knew that this might be David’s last house party. It was early summer, there were crocuses.

Nell’s the one, he said, who had the affair with my father.

Nell, I said. Nell Tarkington.

David was saying that this woman who had caught my eye, this Nell, who had seemed to be someone who might be from a country with a name like Formosa, had come to Corner Brook to study and ended up breaking his parents apart. It seemed improbable and yet not unlikely either that lives you know a little about, or have affected friends in the past, might flare over one’s own life in the future. I knew in my bones that this was the type of woman I could enjoy—in a sense it was like revisiting that old printout of my face, a face I once knew. I wasnt happy with strangers or people who did not know me when I was young. It was the appeal, I realized, of Lars Pony. And part of the reason I wasted talented women in Toronto was I needed a woman who knew something of my past from her own experience. What an odd realization. Nell Tarkington. She was just there, dancing with a handsome man who was too well dressed to be attractive. Nell, if I spoke to her, would know of the things I speak. A fantasy thought, yes, but real nonetheless. And I felt I was in one of those moments where the tectonic plates of life’s decisions move over each other like platters of cake in a revolving glass cabinet. I could get together with this woman, I thought. If I tried very hard. Why not be wilful? She was dancing with a man who looked like he wanted to enjoy her.

Me: Is she with that one?

That one, David said, works for United Architects.

United Architects, I said, in a tone that meant nothing to me.

They were the ones, David explained, with those fabulous towers for New York.

Me:The ones that were never built.

We all liked that design.

It had bent knees, I said. It looked like five people needing to pee.

I would have to break the bond of the hands of that man. He had big hands for a man who worked on a keyboard. As I considered his genetic gift I felt my mouth crack in half, as if my skull had split open and I reeled back with the shock and my tongue collected a tooth, I spat out a tooth and it was black, the nub of a black tooth and of course I had a mouth cancer, I was doomed. My life was over and it was a good life. I’m an easy man to give up the spirit.

David held up my black tooth. An olive pit, he said.

I wanted to drive someone in the liver, but thank god. Then David said, They are wearing bras that turn tits into tennis balls.

His voice altered the focus in my eyes. No, it was the tears from the pain of cracking my tooth on an olive pit. She was gone now. A woman was disappearing and my head was full of a blurry David Twombly. He added more information: Sok Hoon was taking their son, Owen, and going to live in Montreal.

I’m sorry Dave I’m dying here. I just broke a tooth.

Which did not seem to Dave like I was helping him. I guess he noticed me wiping my eyes and rubbing my jaw. Can I be myself with you, he said.

I assured him he could.

He said, They are shaving. The young ones are shaving everything off.

He was ignoring me and so I left him to feel sorry for himself. I searched for a mirror to check out my injury. I needed to spit in a sink and then find Nell. In this way I was not there for David Twombly. I did not notice, really, that Sok Hoon and David were at opposite ends of a photograph of a road disappearing to the horizon. David was in the deep background, chained into the landscape, whereas Sok Hoon had every choice available to her. She was busting out of the frame.

I ventured upstairs to find an available bathroom. I passed the two framed maps David loved, one of Manhattan and the other of Glover Island. They were the same size, these islands, twenty miles long and two miles broad. One with the most densely populated real estate on the continent, the other where not a soul lived.

In the mirror I checked my mouth and all seemed sturdy. I swivelled a flank of mirror to light up my molars. A prescription bottle on the shelf behind and I picked it up and read that it was an antidepressant. Sok Hoon, I thought, but then saw the name. Which was another surprise and yet it is hard to remain forever surprised. Once a shock is received we get used to it.

I scanned about for Nell again. For her mirthful hair. And I realized then that I had created a fanciful projection, using my Wyoming, which is a little game I play with myself. The inner self unspools and I catch that self taking over my body.

My mouth was ginger, the tooth felt both nervous and solid. I returned with drinks. And there was Nell, bending her knee at the side of David’s leg, a leg I now realized was artificially exuberant, staving off a desire to lie down and be depressed.

She’s looking for a place to live, David said. I was thinking you.

Yes, Nell said. You were the squash buddy.

Me:You walked up to me in the cafeteria once and sat with me and said why do you look like youve just gotten out of bed.

Yes, she said, that was my way of flirting.

Isnt it strange, David said, the way the world touches back on itself.

Nell’s eyes narrowed as she tried to see me, almost eighteen years ago, walking through Corner Brook. Eighteen years—it was part of a larger realization we’d all been having that we were now of an age where peers were grand enough to have huge backstories. There was something enjoyable in our wonky connection, and we live in a time when all sorts of coincidences are celebrated. The past is pushed into our eyes.

She was working for IKW and needed someplace to stay. A sublet for the summer would be ideal. We went out to the dark garden and a joint was passed around, rolled in a paper that had a wire in it, so you could bend down the wire as a roach clip. Her mouth had these little folds on either side of it that indicated she was a happy person. Nell liked to laugh. The light from the party seemed to make the green shoots of perennials glow, and there were many of them, like an audience in a dark theatre. Then I was left alone with Nell. Something moved in behind a dark shrub—David’s old dog, Wolf, was arranging foliage with his nose. I might have done the same. It was a warm night.

I looked at Nell’s face as she watched Wolf and I remembered the few times I’d seen her from such a long time ago. I realized she had the same face, she hadnt changed. She had made an impression and yet I had not thought of her in all the years since. Behind us the buzz of the party, a kitchen chair pulled out as if clearing its throat, the intense recessed lighting, a slice of another room down the yellow hall, the bend of a woman’s elbow in the front porch, collecting a light jacket. If you blasted through that elbow, you’d see the open door, guests rummaging for keys, the quarter panel of David Twombly’s hearty Land Rover—the car Sok Hoon would load up and buckle Owen into and drive to Montreal leaving David with the dog, a dog that will have to be put down in six months, and then a deep funnel of night (David’s Toronto house is on a corner), and far away, perhaps a thousand feet down, a red and silver Dundas streetcar slips across an intersection, so sly and distant you could believe it was an inner gear of clockwork shifting, some packed-in-grease mechanism to allow the course of events to be manipulated, if you were prone to believing the world was a contrived stage propped up to make you think all stimuli were natural. I was, of course, slightly stoned.

You had a job, I said, at the mall in Corner Brook at a photo developing shop.

That was my first real job.

I passed by and you reeled me in with your finger. Stand there, you said. Just there. And you took a picture of me with a machine on a table.

That was the second method I had for flirting.

The machine had hummed and out of a dot matrix printer unpeeled a sheet with my picture, a pixelated image in black and white, it was as if someone had made my face on a typewriter. I still have it.

I could feel the heat off her face. We stared out into the harder night and I knew now that no one was left inside except for the caterers and David and Sok Hoon. Sok Hoon was probably in bed. Someone had turned up the music, it was religious music. Nell was in Toronto after leaving Richard Text, she said, her husband in Santa Fe. I was going home to St John’s for the summer and I was wondering about that. I could sense the profile of Nell’s face in the periphery. Very quickly, a few clouds converged and caused a short, tremendous thunder that made the dog afraid.

Do you want to change anything, Nell said.

I turned and faced her. I think, every day, about Leonard Woolf’s caveat about his wife’s journals—that Virginia was happy and fun loving, but only wrote in her diary when she was depressed.

Youre a loving person, she said.

She was filling me up. She was pouring fuel into me. Do you want to see a sublet, I said.

And we walked out of David’s, which was empty now except for the three caterers stacking their stainless steel tureens in crates and collecting wine glasses upside down between their fingers. David was in the front room, alone, with the stereo cranked to nine. He was listening to Mahalia Jackson. David was the least religious person I knew, but in the dark hours he was devoted to Mahalia Jackson, a woman who refused to sing anything but gospel. We left him to Mahalia, he was in good hands, and we took a cab over to my apartment. We could still hear the music when I closed the cab door and the massive chassis jerked away from the curb.